- Hacking pays: “The security firm Cybereason said in 2024 that 84% of ransomware victims paid, and that most were breached again within a year,” via Bloomberg.
- Social security funds have six years until depletion: “When the programme launched in 1940, its future must have seemed assured. Lots of money went in and little came out: for each retired person drawing benefits, more than 150 workers were contributing to the fund, which invested in Treasury securities.
“Today, after years of demographic transformation—lower birth rates bringing fewer workers to the labour force, and longer lifespans for the fortunate recipients—the ratio of workers to recipients is less than three to one.”
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Wednesday review
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Tuesday review
- Gen Z-variety socialism, via Economist: “Plenty of the grievances that animate Gen-Z socialists do stem from real issues. Inflation has been too high, rent in big cities is now often unaffordable and AI could upend the labour market. Dismissing these worries would be foolish. Yet Gen-Z socialism is wrong about how to fix the problems of capitalism. It must be resisted, because it is a profound threat to prosperity.”
- On the American middle class in NYT, by Stephen Rose and Scott Winship of AEI: “In a recent report, we measured class using constant, inflation-adjusted thresholds. The “core” middle class shrank, but so did the classes below the middle — the poor, the near-poor and the lower middle class.”
- Mary Beard’s book on the importance of ancient classics, reviewed: ‘The unlikely image of the future Cambridge don drilling Latin conjugations under the revolutionary eye of Davis is suggestive of what is lost if we allow discourse around the subject to be dominated by what Beard refers to as the “Column Crowd” on the one hand (which celebrates the ancient world as a bastion of the tradition, power and authority it sees embodied in classical architecture), and the “Burn It Down Crowd” (which sees classics as irredeemably tainted by its appropriation for various racist, fascist and imperialist ends) on the other. … “The good news,” Beard tells us, “is that it has always proved hard to corral the ancient world to support convincingly any single modern ideology.”‘
- Toward theories of altruism in psychology: “Despite psychology’s near-universal buy-in to self-interest as the prime mover of prosocial (and other) behaviors, there are well-conceived arguments and growing evidence to suggest that humans are also other-directed—that is, deeply interested in the welfare of others.”
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Monday review
- Yuval Noah Harari in FT: “Granting AIs corporate legal personhood would allow AI agents to take numerous new initiatives, potentially generating enormous new wealth. But legal personhood is an all-purpose key that would also allow AIs access to our financial, economic and political systems.”
- ”The rise of the child-haters” is a sad commentary on our cultural moment.
- Alzheimers from the inside: gut wrenching.
- ”You must account yourself ‘desolate’ in this world, however great the prosperity of your lot may be,” Augustine wrote to Proba, via Tim Keller.
- I read scores of book reviews every week, but the craft isn’t flourishing, writes Daniel Bell in Liberties.
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Sunday review
- JS Bach Cantata for Trinity 1 (Corpus Christi): Brich dem Hungrigen dein Brot, Break your bread with the hungry (BWV 39); German-English interlinear text; Netherlands Bach Collegium; the bass recitative: The bountiful God throws his abundance on us, who without him do not even have breath. What we are is his; he gives only the use [of what we have]but not so that we by ourselves only should feast on his treasures. They are the touchstone by which he makes it known that he dispenses need to the poor as he with gentle hand abundantly bestows on us what is necessary for each person. For the good that he has lent to us we should not bring interest into his barns; Compassion, that is concerned for our neighbour, can more penetrate to his heart than all gifts.
- Preparing for meetings this week with Luther’s preface to the psalms, via Bryan Wolfmueller: But what is the chief subject of the Psalms, if it is not earnestness of language in all the storms and contradictions of life? Where shall we find words more adapted to express joy, than what are contained in the Psalms of thanksgiving and of praise? We see here the hearts of saints. Here’s the first volume of Luther’s Psalm commentary.
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Saturday review
- After popularity in the first two years of the pandemic, English country estates are more difficult to sell in the Cotswolds, Devon, and elsewhere. Amazing photos.
- WSJ review of Ike and Winston: “Above all, reading these two men side by side makes a plausible case for the greatness of Churchill, but also of Eisenhower. The challenge that Churchill faced in 1940 was existential for Britain, but the one Eisenhower faced as president when the Cold War entered the thermonuclear age was existential on a global level. Eisenhower may not have had Churchill’s romanticism, but part of his greatness was his capacity for restraint.”
- Institutional memory will be well preserved by AI?
- The Critical Threats project from AEI is an amazing resource with daily updates. Here’s the latest on Iran.
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Friday review
- Apollo: AI Will Create More Jobs, Not Fewer
- Perusing journals at CHS this week, I found a retrospective of Peter Brown’s World of Late Antiquity. The piece especially emphasizes social dynamism and the underlying social theory that influenced Brown, both cited then and later elaborated in his memoir and other work. More later.
- Anthropic recommends global pause in AI development as recursive self-improvement advances, reports WSJ. More on this later.
- SpaceX’s adjusted earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization in 2040 could top $2.7 trillion, Morgan Stanley told top investors.
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Thursday review
- On Anthropic, in FT: “But the company’s newfound dominance presents more difficult questions. Can it still act ethically to rein in a fast-moving technology while trying to win that race?”
- “American business nowadays is best segmented not by industry but eschatology,” reports Schumpeter.
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Wednesday review
- Gold pulls ahead, FT: “Bullion accounted for 27 per cent of all global central bank reserve assets at the end of 2025, up from 20 per cent a year earlier, according to a report published on Tuesday by the European Central Bank. US Treasuries fell to 22 per cent from 25 per cent over the same period.”
- Of those who grew up attending religious services weekly, 43% attend less than once per year: Ryan Burge.
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Tuesday review
- On the virtues of franchises.
- ”More than 75% of young renters still think they someday will own a home, according to a survey by John Burns Research & Consulting,” reports WSJ in a story on Berkshire’s continued bet on home ownership in America.
- Here’s an enjoyable review of a book on the Psalms in medieval art and life, in LRB: “Groups of psalms were sung in the eight daily services, with the entire psalter being sung every week. The dominance of music in the practice of medieval Christianity can hardly be comprehended now. The image of David as a musician was taken in the medieval church as a command. The sheer amount of music that was composed for all of the many services was immense, and new music was regularly and lavishly introduced for major feast days, especially Christmas and Easter. Monks, nuns and clergy had a stream of music to learn and sing, in proliferating genres: hymns, sequences, antiphons, responsories and sung prayers based on devotional texts. Ecclesial life was so rich with sound in part because singing was intrinsic to learning to read: young children in monasteries, nunneries and cathedral schools were taught literacy through memorising the psalms, trained to utter complex thoughts and feelings through song.
“The initial ‘C’ illustrated in the Windmill Psalter marks the beginning of Psalm 97, ‘Cantate domino canticum novum’ (‘O sing unto the Lord a new song’), from which this book takes its title. The line also occurs in five other psalms and in Isaiah 42. Filling the initial with singing monks was a fitting emblem for the magnificent task of humbly praising God, in the smallest local church as well as in the mighty institutions of the Christian West.” - The rankings for results from PISA 2022 are here. Singapore led with an aggregate score of 1679. The U.S. scored 1468 (between Denmark and Sweden), Canada 1519, Mexico 1220. PISA 2025 will be released on September 8.
- Nvidia announced a “superchip” to make available “AI supercomputers in your house, running agents and assistants,” says Semafor.
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Remote work vs AI?
A new study argues that remote work is to blame for weak hiring of entry-level employees. John Burn-Murdoch in FT: “the rise of remote work has worsened the trade-off for hiring entry-level workers [who require more supervision and need to build skills, knowledge, and social capital in person], while leaving the calculus for senior hires unchanged.”
The abstract for the original study is this:
Is generative AI replacing junior workers? A growing literature answers yes, citing large declines in early-career hiring concentrated in GenAI-exposed occupations. We argue that this verdict is premature because GenAI exposure is strongly correlated with another post-pandemic shock, working from home (WFH). Using two data sources spanning 243 million new hires and 407 million online job postings, collected across the US, UK, Canada, and Australia during 2017-2025, we estimate difference-in-difference designs at the occupation, region, and firm level. When estimated separately, a two-standard-deviation increase in GenAI and WFH exposure each predicts, by 2025, a fall of around 5pp in the junior-share of new hires and around 3pp in the share of job ads requiring limited experience. Estimated jointly, the WFH effect remains, while the GenAI coefficient attenuates sharply and is often statistically indistinguishable from zero. Alternative exposure measures, residualization designs, flexible non-parametric co-treatment controls, and replacing exposure-measures with actual WFH adoption as the treatment all support our finding that WFH is a robust predictor of the decline in early-career hiring.
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Monday review
- “Those who ultimately fell into a midcareer slump averaged 30% wage growth in their first 10 years of work, compared with 71% for those who kept progressing… The good news is that obtaining a few strategic skills to shift into a more promising, adjacent field can significantly reduce the risk,” reports WSJ.
- Sanjana Friedman, City Journal: “In the debate over data-center construction, we are indeed deciding how much electricity to allocate or how much water to conserve. But we are also deciding whether the risks of progress outweigh the risks of stagnation, and whether we are still the sort of society willing to find out.”
- “The scene of the ransom of Hektor, originally configured in terms of archaic gift-exchange, increasingly [over the 6th and 5th centuries, especially 570-430] drew upon the form and symbols of imperial expression found in West Asia and then, finally, in classical Athens itself…”–based on Athenian vase paintings, argues Margaret C. Miller in Antike Kunst.
- JRR Tolkien drew extensively on his classical education and classical sources, which is finally being appreciated, says a recent review in Acta Classica. Note the Old Forest as an Ovidian landscape, Tom Bombadil as a Christianized Orphic figure, hospitality as xenia, Numenor like a Platonic Atlantis, reappropriating ancient models of idealized communities, etc.
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Sunday review
- JS Bach Cantata for Trinity Sunday, O heilges Geist- und Wasserbad, O sacred bath of water and the Spirit (BWV 165, Netherlands Bach Collegium); the final chorale, Sein Wort, sein Tauf, sein Nachtmahl: His word, his baptism, his supper / serve us against all misfortune / The Holy Spirit in faith teaches us to trust in these things.
- Yuval Levin of AEI responds to Magnifica Humanitas.
- Remedial education needed without the SAT.
- Shocking: “A separate Lumina-Gallup study found that more than half of students said their college discourages or prohibits AI use entirely, while another majority said at least some of their courses have no clear policy at all. The difference leaves students to absorb contradictory signals about a technology that is simultaneously reshaping their future job market and their present classroom.
‘Students are making decisions on their own, which may not always be the best decisions for them,’ Brown said. ‘Higher ed isn’t there to guide them.’” - The coming physical AI boom: “Venture-capital investment in global robotics and physical AI grew to $26 billion in 2025 from $4.2 billion in 2019, according to PitchBook data. This year, companies in those sectors have already raised more than $23 billion as of May 20.”
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Saturday review
- How France’s education system fell, via NR.
- Robert Doar fittingly praises Robert Woodson after Woodson’s death on May 19, 2026.
- Among those raised with no religion, 71% still have no religion, according to Ryan Burge.
- AI as a religion: “‘Practically speaking, it will achieve the outcomes that many religions claim their deities would be able to achieve,’ [David Nixon] said. This is an increasingly common belief among researchers in Silicon Valley. They insist they are on their way to building a more powerful species — or even a new God,” reports the NYT. “A.I. researchers are trying to build technologies that have jobs, feel joy and pain, and exhibit all sorts of qualities that match and even exceed the traits that make us human. He believes it could happen within the decade.”
- FT: “OpenAI’s foundation has said it will grant $250mn to promote research into AI’s impact on the economy and jobs, as the ChatGPT maker’s charitable arm aims to soften the impact of the powerful technology.”
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Friday review
- A pessimistic article on optimism, via Economist.
- Here’s a review of a recent book on the function argument in Aristotle’s ethics, which, because the book uses “inventive translations,” includes nice discussions of bios, teleios, physis, and others.
- “A record 29% of Americans now identify as religiously unaffiliated — the largest single religious cohort, surpassing Catholics (19%) and evangelical Protestants (23%), Pew Research Center reports,” via Axios.
- Robert Watson is the chief concierge at the Willard in Washington—here’s a fascinating profile.
- Chronic absenteeism or a performance review from students?
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Thursday review
- Americans watched 33 billion minutes of Star Wars on TV in 2025, with the leading film being the 1977 original.
- Adventures in cosmetic surgery: zombie fillers.
- Civics education is rebounding since its nadir a decade ago, argues Danielle Allen. And from her org this week.
- A relationship seems likely between rising R&D expenditures and declining cash reserves relative to total assets, says the Federal Reserve.
- This is one version of the future of public research universities.